35 ms·

Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API

805 points by davidbarker 4y ago

bhaak 4y ago
I have a hard time believing that bots were using the free API and Twitter wasn't able to shut them down easily. Even a mediocre programmer could do that. Anyway, almost nothing Elon Musk has said about Twitter seems plausible and this also doesn't. I'm on the fence if he's trying to just generate as much cash flow as possible (after driving away so much ads money) or if he's actively trying to run Twitter into the ground.
college_physics 4y ago
At some point I saw speculation that the idea is to turn twitter into some sort of super-app like wechat. If that is true then it makes sense to button down loose "ecosystem" thingies that were setup during a more innocent and hopeful era. This will probably destroy a whole bunch of use-cases and motivations for people and organizations to use twitter, but might retain enough of a core (mostly low-information) user base to seed what will practically be an entirely new venture but one with a recognizable name. There might, for example, be new API's, for corporates to push product algorithmically and embed instant, buy now - pay later, buttons.
- altacc 4y ago
  I think that's nothing more than a pipe dream. It seems that Twitter is bordering dysfunctional internally and is hemorrhaging money at the worst possible time (massive debts to support, slowing economy, less accessible loans). I think Twitter's current strategy is desperately trying to make money and stop the losses. Many APIs do have price tiers but it depends upon the business model, if the API is the product, or the app is the product and the API drives traffic and use cases. For a super-app, arguably the app is the product & profit generator and an open, free API would support usage of that.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    Also regulators in on some of Twitters core markets (EU and US) are not to fond of ginormous Techconglomerates at the moment and might have a few words to say about that. In fact the EU recently passed laws to nip budding "market dominant companies" before they take out all of the competition and bundle lots of unrelated services. The political climate soured with regards to Big Tech and that's happening across party lines.
    - college_physics 4y ago
      The perplexing thing is that all these headwinds are fairly well known and for some time (even though probably internalized more by participants in this particular forum). So this raises the question whether there was any rationality attached to the infamous $44bln purchase. One could hypothesise that it was just a random, discretionary action, made possible by an insane system that has lost any sense of value, purpose or accountability. In either case this story will definitely increase popcorn consumption.
      - arlcode 4y ago
        I'm in the "impulsive purchase including buyers remorse" camp. Also yes (wo)men in Elons Musks inner circle who are unable to contradict him. Now that the deals i done he needs to make the best of it (for his ego but also for Tesla control reasons). What will come of it remains to be seen. It could still end in a number of ways
        anigbrowl 4y ago
        I don't think it's that simple. Imagine if you had 'overpaid' for ownership of most US radio broadcasting in 1938. On paper it might look like a terrible investment, but depending on your goals and alliances it might be worth massively more than the book value.
        arlcode 4y ago
        Could be and billionaires have a tendency to fall very softly. I'm still figuring out how the "no due diligence, no exit hatch - final offer" figures into this. Why no not do it like you usually approach a takeover of this scale. He did try to wiggle out of it almost instantly and found himself locked into the contract by "himself". To me this feels like he made a fairly emotional decision, used his influential network and personal assets to setup the deal but was afraid to "chicken out"/face reality when given the chance.
- achr2 4y ago
  Who in their right mind would trust twitter with anything more 512 character banal musings after this tumultuous year? Mobile payments or secure messaging? Yikes!
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Teslas are cars. They may accidentally race through Chinese cities at 150 miles an hour sometimes, but people still buy and drive them.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > At some point I saw speculation that the idea is to turn twitter into some sort of super-app like wechat. If that is true then it makes sense to button down loose "ecosystem" thingies that were setup during a more innocent and hopeful era. What do you think WeChat is if not integration of hundreds of external apps and developers? If you were really serious about turning Twitter into WeChat, you would: - have an actual plan how to do it - have this plan publicly available - explain the changes to the APIs beforehand - have the pricing info for the changes beforehand - give developers a clear path of moving to this new wechat thingie - give developers plenty of time to move to this new wechat thingie, work closely with them and figure out and iron out any issues What Elon did: - killed third-party ecosystem (Twitter wouldn't be twitter without third-party apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640515) with no warning and no path forward - killed a huge third-party ecosystem [1] with a week's warning and no path forward [1] Of course it's not just bots. Does he really think that news outlets, media outlets, celebrities etc. post to Twitter manually by hand?
  - dmak 4y ago
    At this point, I think the person who paid bajillion dollars for twitter can do as they see fit. I'm just waiting for a new social media platform to pop up now.
akmarinov 4y ago
Guys, Twitter is we knew it is dead, it might even completely die soon. The sooner accounts like celebs, governments, etc realize it and move on - the better
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  I don't use it aside from following links to it (e.g. from HN), so this isn't intended to be a counter anecdote... but from that perspective it seems almost exactly the same as before Musk took over. What's changed?
  - acdha 4y ago
    Musk made the finances much worse by adding so much debt to the books right around the time he pushed a large number of advertisers and people who'd been creating content for him away. Twitter would otherwise have been looking at a profit measured in hundreds of millions this year, similar to what last year would have been without that lawsuit settlement.
- aaa_aaa 4y ago
  Do you refer to yourself as `we`?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    It's the PMC "we." Similar to the royal "we," except with more pleading.
moomoo11 4y ago
is it really that hard to just not use twitter? I swear to god replace meth with twitter and it’s sad how many addicts there are. Academic research? Research something else that’s actually novel. Making bots? Try building something new in the AI space. Need to reach your customers in case your service is down? Just use a different host for ur status.whatever.com and email/sms/whatever else them.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  I use it to keep on top of what my field of work is doing. Since pretty much all companies and many relevant people regularly post concise short updates with relatively little spam I can do that in about half an hour every few days. I could stop using Twitter and check everyone's website/blog/facebook(?) directly, but that would take a lot more time and I don't know where I would even find most of the individuals, I suspect they only use Twitter, and not all companies crosspost either. It would be a real shame to lose that.
  - moomoo11 4y ago
    Yeah but wouldn’t your quality of the information you take in go up? Conversations on twitter are awful especially interesting ones in tech or science with the noise and chaos that always ensues. Personally I’ve been enjoying using my browsers bookmark manager. I’ve added maybe a hundred bookmarks last year of blogs and whatnot and it’s cool to organize my links and my home tab shows me them easily.
    - dividedbyzero 4y ago
      I don't think so. I'd just miss out on more and filtering what's relevant and what isn't would be more time-consuming (I can scan 2-3 sentences in a Tweetdeck cell a lot quicker than a rambling blog post in heavily styled blog). If there's something I need/want to know in detail, I'll read up on it and maybe research further, so that wouldn't change, but I'd have a harder time finding these things and I'd probably spot emerging trends later (that's what Twitter conversations tend to be pretty useful for).
ecmascript 4y ago
Very short notice but otherwise I don't get why people are mad that it is going paid only. Try making an API request to Instagram or the other thousands of large websites that doesn't evne have an api. If you like the service, just pay for it. I pay for a lot of services already and I do not see why Twitter must absolutely be free. Honestly, I prefer a world where people charge for their products because it will make it easier for everyone when people stop expecting great stuff to be free. I also love how the people who mainly hate on Twitter now is roughly the same people that constantly said "If you don't like how it's being rung, build your own" etc. Now when Musk bought Twitter and thus got ownership fair and square, it does no longer apply?
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > Now when Musk bought Twitter and thus got ownership fair and square, it does no longer apply? That’s a false equivalency. We agree that he’s allowed to run twitter however he wants to (barring deliberately running into the ground, which is probably illegal). We just think he’s an idiot in how he goes about it.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Exactly. The way I see it, Twitter was a zombie company for quite a few years. Not sustainable the way it was. Lots of bots, obnoxious people, scammers, spammers, etc. and not a whole lot of positive stuff happening from a business point of view. Bloated big silicon valley company long out of ideas on how to fix things. Hiring more people and trying to be woke clearly wasn't helping. The notion that this could just have gone on as is was never a plan. Musk is applying shock therapy to maybe nudge it in the direction of resembling a healthy company again. Maybe he'll kill the company. Maybe it will work. But this is better than the failed social experiment it had turned into. The API of course had some valid uses but it was also the tool of choice for bots, advertisers, marketing bureaus, etc. The message is very clear for those: you are welcome to stay but expect to pay for the privilege. I think this probably gets rid of a lot of crap.
  - ecmascript 4y ago
    Very few wants to pay for hosting crap, so yes I would also believe it would get rid of the overwhelming majority of the crap.
ing33k 4y ago
It makes me sad. But is it Musks way of cutting costs by ending free access to the API ? Perhaps this move is aimed at reducing infrastructure expenses for the company in addition to solving the bots issue and may be introduce additional revenue stream ?
brutuscat 4y ago
Time to crawl! You can use something like Webrecorder, which IPFS also uses to pin tweets: https://blog.ipfs.tech/announcing-pin-tweet-to-ipfs/ https://blog.ipfs.tech/announcing-pin-tweet-to-ipfs/ See https://webrecorder.net https://webrecorder.net Example https://replayweb.page/?source=https%3A%2F%2Freplayweb.page%2Fdocs%2Fassets%2Ftweet-example.wacz#view=pages&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fwebrecorder_io%2Fstatus%2F1565881026215219200%3Fref_src%3Dtwsrc%255Etfw%257Ctwcamp%255Etweetembed%257Ctwterm%255E1565881026215219200%257Ctwgr%255Ee8c57cea50b2bf6a340bb4387a88a33f6e5fb36e%257Ctwcon%255Es1_%26ref_url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Foembed.link%252Fhttps%253A%252F%252Ftwitter.com%252Fwebrecorder_io%252Fstatus%252F1565881026215219200&ts=20221002034606 https://replayweb.page/?source=https%3A%2F%2Freplayweb.page%...
- naillo 4y ago
  I've been using this https://github.com/JustAnotherArchivist/snscrape https://github.com/JustAnotherArchivist/snscrape and with 5 threads and no vpn, just my laptop, have been getting about 1 million tweets a day (vs 1000 before being rate limited on the api). Lots of fun
- kibwen 4y ago
  Headlines one week from now: "Twitter announces they will be discontinuing the web interface"
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    I'm holding out for 'Wanna tweet? That will be $1' Incidentally they started sending out emails yesterday offering gold organization checkmarks for $1000/month + $50 per public-facing seat. I'm not sure how many businesses will want this, but I bet a lot of political nonprofits and media outlets will leap at the opportunity to boost their visibility (more boosting available for more $, kinda like promoted tweets).
- unboxingelf 4y ago
  Aside: can someone explain to me how IPFS, in this specific case, is any better than a typical 3rd party service storing the data? The linked announcement says they use a pinning service “web3.storage”. Web3.storage says it stores data on FileCoin. Neither website tells me how and where the actual data is stored, except “IPFS”. From reading the IPFS docs, a pinning service is akin to a node that has a copy of the files and is always online. If your decentralized network relies on a central node(s), how is this decentralized?
tiagod 4y ago
I don't buy that reason. Malicious bot owners will just run automated browsers and use the regular UI, or MITM the private API used by the apps. Sure, they're probably using the public API right now, but that's just for convenience. Bad actors will ways find a way, this only hurts legit bot owners.
- whoopdedo 4y ago
  Or they'll simply pay the toll and carry on as usual. It's a business expense to them. And now, if they get blocked, they can complain about it because they're a paying customer.
Obscurity4340 4y ago
Don't threaten us with a good time /s
numpad0 4y ago
There is also a massive ban wave is going on, some people are claiming to have lost followers overnight in three to four digits and losing following account as well - mostly content creators with years worth of organic posts. Extra salt to the wounds is the horde of spam bots don't seem too affected, if at all, because they don't show up on Firehose too often, which is probably how this newly implemented spam filtering picks up contents to decide on. Some are speculating that some apps that had regular auto-tweets configured to be the culprit, which was later backed with some data, some are making up theories and rituals to protect accounts, some others are making backup accounts on Twitter itself, on Mastodon, or yet another platforms. This seems like another round of Twitter's footgun towards tumblr, with some users making it out, and bulk of values and the community burning to the ground.
- JdeBP 4y ago
  One thing to consider: These events where Twitter does something like this trigger visible migration waves, observable from the FediVerse and elsewhere. There are several spikes in graphs over the past few months, that correlate with things like disabling TweetBot et al.. People are giving out advice to those who migrate away from Twitter to unfollow everyone that they were following, but leave the account undeleted to prevent impersonation in the future of a long-standing identity. The unfollowing is in order to not accrue stuff with a zombie account and in order to let the people still sticking with Twitter know that their followers are gone. This fits with your observations: real followers gone, in a distinct wave, and robot accounts blithely continuing on. But it means that it isn't banning at all. The people seeing this from the Twitter side and thinking that it's down to some mysterious "ban wave" aren't realizing that people are simply leaving them; voting with their feet. Account figures won't show it, but dropping follower figures and massively curtailed engagement with real people do. The people who didn't like the politics have gone, or have been ejected. The people who were left exposed to unmoderated attacks have gone. The people who provided or who used the 3rd-party apps have gone. The people who relied upon a free-of-charge API to do all sorts of fun hobbyist and one-person-band things, from pictures of possums every hour to automated posts by artists and content creators, have stated that they're going, and have actually found themselves gone already in some cases within the past 30 hours, well before 2023-02-09.
niho 4y ago
I tried to create a Twitter account for my new startup a couple of days ago. Wanted a business account to promote my app and get feedback from users. But it was simply impossible. The signup didn’t work. I gave up and went with Instagram instead. Much better experience. And I’ve already spent a big pot of money there on ads. Very happy with it. Musk is such a looser.
nickjj 4y ago
Wow this is disruptive given it's less than 1 week's notice. I've been using a Jekyll plugin for like 4 years to embed tweets on my site. Nothing crazy, just using: https://github.com/rob-murray/jekyll-twitter-plugin https://github.com/rob-murray/jekyll-twitter-plugin Since it uses the API I guess that's going to go away. Sounds like I'll never link another tweet on my site again.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  screenshots?
  - papito 4y ago
    That is horrible. I quite often click on embedded tweets and then end up spending more time on the site. It's literally a cheap lead in for ad exposure. Musk does not seem to understand how this whole Internet thing works. "If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how computers work.” https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover...
    - tee_0 4y ago
      You believe that there will never be embedded tweets again because twitter is going to charge an unknown amount of money for their API? You have musk derangement syndrome dude
      - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        He said he wants $100 a month, whatever that’s worth.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    Why use an image where text will do (and will do better). But in this case it does seem like copy/pasting the text may be better as it implicitly archives the content.
DarkmSparks 4y ago
That's another project cancelled. Thankfully not much invested in it.
sylware 4y ago
Oh... is Nitter based on the API protocol is using the javascript obfuscated web browser protocol?
- sylware 4y ago
  Nitter is based on the obfuscated javascript network protocol then should still work after the API shutdown.
- bob_theslob646 4y ago
  >"Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)" Will be interesting to see if it works in a week
m463 4y ago
I'm reminded of the saying: "tax what you want less of" I wonder if this is a good move or one that will hurt the company in the long run.
Jach 4y ago
One of my first programming jobs involved helping the boss make a twitter sharecropping service. I remember at some point after that project twitter made a big TOS/API change and crippled a wave of startups at the time. I was doing something else by then but it was a good warning to not let myself ever depend too much on sharecropping; over the years I've seen a lot of people learn that lesson the hard way. I've used the API since then for on-off things, but the one I'm sore about now is a little Python script I've had running in a nightly cronjob for years that I've used to make local copies of images/videos from tweets I starred (now heart'd). It's a simple bit of code to get all my favorites and download any new ones. (If I recall correctly you need to get all of them, because the response doesn't necessarily give them to you in the order you liked them, so if today you like an old tweet from say 2012 you might have to paginate a while to get it in the response.) Looks like the json of all ~9800 liked tweets I build up to parse for new URLs is 1.5 MB gzipped, it's true their API returns a lot of unnecessary extra data. Currently debating with myself whether to cobble together a new script from one of the existing scrapers (gallery-dl might be easiest), or say screw it and write some Lisp code (more stable than Python) to fire up Selenium and waste more of twitter's bandwidth pretending to be a full browser.
- RunSet 4y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/CE6UCac.png https://i.imgur.com/CE6UCac.png
  - dopidopHN 4y ago
    Lots of nice reference. I usually hates those but it was funny.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  > at some point after that project twitter made a big TOS/API change and crippled a wave of startups at the time. I remember. We shelved the product idea we had because of that. There were a couple API changes that disrupted development and it became clear that betting the company on someone else's API was a terrible idea.
- xena 4y ago
Overtonwindow 4y ago
This wasn't handled very well, but… I do think it's the right thing to do. If you have a service that depends on something else (API) to make money, it's not unreasonable that you should have to pay a reasonable fee to that service.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Does this mean that all third party Twitter clients that don't scrape will require payment?
WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
This makes sense... let's switch lightweight mostly-text API usage to full page scraping... this will cost Twitter a lot.
dom96 4y ago
If you're looking to transition to Mastodon I built a browser extension which might help. The extension injects your Mastodon timeline into Twitter, so you can for example follow some of the bots and accounts that will no longer be on Twitter (the ElonJet account being a particularly good example) and still see their posts on Twitter. It won't be affected by these API changes and should be a nice way to dip your feet into Mastodon if you haven't already. https://chirper.picheta.me/ https://chirper.picheta.me/
evan_ 4y ago
I’ve got a couple of dev accounts on Twitter and I still don’t think I’ve received an email about this. I wonder how many people will find out about this for the first time when their app breaks.
- freewizard 4y ago
  Same boat. And the price/limit is still unknown for this new basic plan. Fortunately only 1% of my users depends on Twitter API, so I just let them know I might just shutdown Twitter integration by 2/8 and suggest them all move off Twitter to other platforms.
lando2319 4y ago
Sad, I have a hacker news Vim bot, he doesn't even tweet that often. Ugh https://twitter.com/HN_Vimmy_Bot https://twitter.com/HN_Vimmy_Bot
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
I don't understand the problem. You can either use Twitter's official clients (and get served the ads from which they profit) or you can use a third party tool that uses the ad-less API but for which the developers must pay for each API call in your place. I'm sure that research bodies and other particular institutions could strike up a deal with Twitter to get access to special keys at a much reduced price or even for free, but this concept of Twitter making avaiable themselves a way to bypass the only way they make money has always seemed crazy to me. Glad they monetized the API.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
octacat 4y ago
More like cutting down the alternative clients. Kinda reminds me facebook limiting API access to "protect privacy" (and kill the way to scrap posts, so you can make an app with a different feed ordering). Though, still instagram is full of porn/spam bots with names annapeterson20243324 and the same profile description.
- TwiceCubed 4y ago
  [dead]
insane_dreamer 4y ago
this was clearly telegraphed some weeks ago when they cut off Twitter apps (Tweetbot at the like). Not a good way to go about it in order to engender good will, but I would never recommend building something that you expect to last forever around a free API by a for-profit company (which could be cut at any time). We've seen this movie before. As for Twitter's demise, I wouldn't count on it. I noticed a toot on Mastodon from someone I used to follow on Twitter mentioning they had 150K followers on Twitter and 1/10th of that on Mastodon. This person is a very harsh Elon (and Tesla) critic, so if anyone were to leave Twitter in protest it would be them. But that would mean losing a 150K audience, so not gonna happen (it's an influence, not money question). I myself did drop Twitter (though I didn't delete my account mostly in case I want to look someone up there) for Mastodon, but find that I go very little to Mastodon anyway (doesn't have anywhere near Twitter's breadth of content). So basically I've dropped Twitter-like engagement altogether, which is a ReallyGoodThingTM because it was a time sync that added very little value to my life. But I think I'm in a very small minority; most people want to stay connected. I'm still on IG (family/friends photos), and HN (interesting content), but that's it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jlee12 4y ago
I mean, fair enough man.
todd3834 4y ago
I imagine this will clear out a lot of bots
reidjs 4y ago
RIP Markdown Tweet Scheduler [1], you worked great while you lasted. [1] https://github.com/reidjs/markdown-tweet-scheduler https://github.com/reidjs/markdown-tweet-scheduler
bunnyswipe_com 4y ago
And the price is not affordable, 150 per month !!
deleted 4y ago
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tee_0 4y ago
I remember when steam came out people absolutely lost their shit. They rallied against it hardcore because they wanted complete control and ownership of their games. The single image that sticks in my mind is an animated gif someone made of the steam logo, two connecting rods, cycling back and forth like one of those mechanical fucking machines, fucking a guy in the ass. It was the same kind of juvenile vitriol that is currently on display. Imagine those people had been successful, and they might have been. Steam is beloved by everyone and is a huge and important part of gaming today. And why couldn’t those people just have an open mind about it? Why couldn’t they see past their own noses?
- tee_0 4y ago
  From a Reddit thread ten years ago: Steam killed big half-life mods. Essentially, by keeping all the clients up-to-date (by force) with no way to go back, they forced all the clients past where they'd released the SDKs for...
mkaszkowiak 4y ago
500 requests for $150 seems like inadequate pricing.
topherPedersen 4y ago
I think Elon is just trying to boost revenue. They have a product that isn't being fully monetized, so he's trying to squeeze a little more out of it. Pretty good business move to be honest. I haven't checked the pricing for the basic tier, but as long as it's reasonable and most indie devs can afford it, I'd say this is a good move. (I've used the free API before for side projects, and I would probably pay for access as long as the price isn't too crazy)
- tdeck 4y ago
  Aa a dev (indie or otherwise), wouldn't you be reluctant to invest more in a platform that did this? https://tapbots.com/tweetbot/ https://tapbots.com/tweetbot/
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
  [dead]
mjmsmith 4y ago
Enjoy https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/twitter-bot-api-changes-killing-fun https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/twitter... just for the phrase "Vichy Twitter".
browningstreet 4y ago
I reduced all my Twitter follows to basically road traffic and weather accounts. I'm wary about how much of this will continue to be available after these APIs go pay-only. I don't think it's a problem to charge a basic fee for these things, but the inscrutability, randomness, and untrustworthiness of Twitter policies and products may reduce the adoption rate for these changes - even if the fee was only $5/mo.
criddell 4y ago
I wonder how many people have decided that rather than move to Mastodon, Post, Cohost, or any of the other social networks, they don’t really need a Twitter-like service in their lives. How many people are fed up with Twitter and deciding to just drop it rather than move?
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  This internet fad is sure to blow over sooner or later.
sva_ 4y ago
Does Nitter use the API? > Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)[0] Not sure what that means 0. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
- banana_giraffe 4y ago
  https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/consts.nim https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/consts.nim They use a leaked token from one of the mobile clients that twitter can't/won't revoke.
heresjohnny 4y ago
I think I’m in the minority here, but I understand and support this decision. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like it: this move is bad for the internet and freedom of information. However, this company is close to bankruptcy and is sitting on a wealth of interesting data. Ads can provide revenue only up to a certain point, after which UX will be affected. If I were Twitter’s CEO, I would’ve done the same.
guywithahat 4y ago
As someone who's currently using the twitter API, this sucks, but I get it. The unfortunate bit though is I started using this in college when I had very little money. College students aren't going to cough up money each month to make a meme bot, and this might change the culture of twitter in a negative way
kderbyma 4y ago
Musk is an idiot. This is just another example of idiocy ... the best thing he provided was a meme face....and the sad face meme
- jahnu 4y ago
  Deliberately killing off free content sources for your platform that relies on fresh content to monetise is truly one of the most clueless things I’ve seen him do so far.
theonething 4y ago
If your business model relies on a valuable service you're receiving being predictably free, it's bad business model.
slaymaker1907 4y ago
I can't find any details about the basic API. It's ridiculous to do something like this without giving people concrete details about the paid plan. Also, their current premium plan is astronomically expensive. It's apparently about $150 for 500 requests!
cbeach 4y ago
If it’s a reasonable price I don’t mind paying a bit to keep my hobby projects going. To be honest I’m surprised I’ve had free access to Twitter’s graph for so long. That said, I’m pissed off at Musk for giving so little time, and so little information. I realise he needs to sort out the bot problem, and needs to diversify Twitter’s revenue streams, but developers have helped create legitimate content on the network, and helped invent a useful ecosystem around it, which in turn has helped Twitter grow its native user base and brand.
Justsignedup 4y ago
I think the main reasoning behind this is to get news orgs to pay to get their articles pushed to twitter. And its less costly than hiring someone to do it. The point is, as with everything musk, EVERYTHING IS POORLY THOUGHT THROUGH!
ggm 4y ago
Is there some law which says Musks other assets cannot be seized when the inevitable bankruptcy happens? Is see a lot of "it's 4d chess" comments and I keep thinking: wait, he has all these other assets: in the jurisdictions I live in he would be forced to meet his debts from Tesla and spacex shares.
- yborg 4y ago
  The debt is Twitter's, not Musk's personally.
  - ggm 4y ago
    Fair. I didn't understand his cretinous allies had let him avoid any personal liability. I almost hope he does wreck it so that Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays and Mitsubishi investors takes a bath. Schadenfreude. https://www.afr.com/technology/looming-twitter-interest-payment-leaves-musk-with-unpalatable-options-20230118-p5cdg3#:~:text=The%20%24US13%20billion%20debt%20is,its%20Twitter%20Blue%20subscription%20service https://www.afr.com/technology/looming-twitter-interest-paym.... But, he's got $26b in it. He won't retain control unless he stands by the debts of the others, he'll be last in line for repayment if he wants to own it according to the AFR write up.
mattkevan 4y ago
Heh, 420 comments. Musk’s going to love that.
rfmoz 4y ago
They are doing that for give an small step backward next week, giving the impression that they are hearing the users. Hopefully it’ll give a narrow free api usage…
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
Frankly, I'm surprised Twitter gave out free API access at all. Bots have been the biggest problem for its platform for so long.
cramjabsyn 4y ago
What a joke
yablak 4y ago
Last chance to use https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ ?
senttoschool 4y ago
This is why I will never build a company based around a free API from a for-profit company. I'd never be able to sleep well at night knowing that years of work and all the employees/families that depend on the business is dependent on someone who could wake up one day and decide on a whim to end access.
- npteljes 4y ago
  I generally feel that if you like to sleep at night, business is not the way to go. I don't see how business people can just do one thing over a long time, and be sustainable. Rather, I see that successful business people (and I don't mean the outliers like Bill Gates) react to changes quickly and constantly adapt to new environments. The nature of their business always changes. So we enter Business Continuity Plans. The businesses either had that, or they were diverse enough so that one leg failing doesn't mean end of the business.
- pjc50 4y ago
  You should never build a company based around phone calls, because one day your phone might get cut off. You should never build a company around electricity, because one day your electricity might get cut off.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    Phone and electricity are not a monopoly. You can get them from different providers.
- warning26 4y ago
  I think this every time there’s a “what cool thing should I build with OpenAI’s API?” post. A nice thought, but once OpenAI decides to pull the rug out from under you, it won’t matter what you built.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    > “It’s just an OpenAI/ChatGPT wrapper” is the new “It’s just an AWS wrapper” that would have made you miss a generation of cloud-native companies. https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1621204449959231493 https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1621204449959231493 People who build on top of them will have stacked cash in the meantime, even if the API does eventually get pulled.
anigbrowl 4y ago
- announced at 10pm - basically a week to decide what to do with your dev project - No information to help you make that decision This seems like more management by manchild. I strongly suspect that Musk realized his promises of cutting down bots etc. were failing and that they either couldn't or wouldn't develop abuse detection, so he's decided to solve the problem by making it cost money, with the (perhaps desired) side effect of crippling academic/analytic research. As an amateur network science researcher, I'm pretty steamed. I enjoy doing my own network analyses using tools like Gephi and have monitored probably a hundred breaking news or trending issues, as well as amassing a great collection of academic papers by smarter folk than me. I don't run any kind of app or service that sits on top of Twitter, but those who do run legitimate services are now being held hostage because of the unchecked abuse. Ant the failure to deal with botspam is lamentable. Twitter has refused for years to implement even the simplest things like hashing tweets and looking for collisions, or considering the count of edges to the hashtag graph, or even looking at tweet frequency. Many of their abuse problems will continue unabated; the sellers in the market for bogus twitter accounts are likely delighted because they now have a great excuse to raise prices, even though most of their 'product' is produced by hand with cheap labor in poor countries.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Musks promises of cutting down on bots only mattered to him and to the degree he made a big deal about it. He could have declared victory whenever and been done with it. Who would have argued.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    I would have because all his posts are still full of bot spam and crypto scams... But, he certainly has no shortage of bots that upvote and call him king.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    I think people would have argued with him. There are people that fawn on him one day and then complain that 'the algorithm has shadowbanned them again' the next, and he spends a surprising amount of time engaging with them. It's like some weird parody of an abusive relationship, with the world's erstwhile richest man and uber-CEO earnestly and repeatedly appeasing influencers like 'Catturd.' To an extent I think this is political theater, as opposed to ineptitude, petulance, or poor financial decision-making. Twitter is an important piece of virtual territory because it's still the platform for breaking news and pretty much every media outlet publishes and promotes stories there, as well as most politicians, govt agencies and so on. Like it or not it is the most 'realtime' mass market platform. That gives Twitter tremendous strategic importance, even though its social graph is smaller and more ephemeral than Facebook's. Size is not everything; reach matters too. That strategic importance makes it interesting to state and non-state actors, because capture of that territory is loosely equivalent to control of radio broadcasting capacity or printing presses in earlier eras. If you think of Twitter as a magically effective print and distribution store for pamphleteers with a huge secondary ecosystem around it, the shutdown of free API access is essentially a market takeover. Musk was spitballing yesterday and suggesting that from now on API access would cost $100/month and require ID to use. (It's interesting to me that Google could have owned that space with their News product, although it has always been a one-way thing rather than socially driven. Their failure to own that space is a direct result of their aversion to user configurability and selection.)
NicoJuicy 4y ago
Twitter is going into code Red when news organizations are going to start charging Twitter for use of their site... Or simply blocking them.
- olliej 4y ago
  I don’t think that’s likely. News orgs dependent on people seeing ads, so they benefit from their story going viral on twitter more than I think twitter benefits from people posting them. At the other end you have the conservative news channels that aggressively push bigot nonsense, and short as hell wouldn’t drop the opportunity to continue twitters conversion to parler.
  - herbst 4y ago
    What does going viral on Twitter even mean when no one is using Twitter anymore. That other bots, that don't use the bots API, find your used hashtags interesting?
    - aembleton 4y ago
      > no one is using Twitter anymore Many are still using it. If they weren't this story wouldn't have ranked so high on HN
Luciatrutth 4y ago
[dead]
anigbrowl 4y ago
@dang wondering why this rather major tech story doesn't make the front page, when stories with fewer points that were posted much earlier have. The lack of transparency is actively hindering HN's news functionality.
- andreareina 4y ago
  Probably a combination of: Users flagging the post Domain-based downweight (dang has mentioned it exists for Wikipedia for example, no idea if it’s automated or manual) Posts with bad comments:upvote ratio get downweighted (IIRC dang calls them overheated discursions?) And FWIW it’s on the front page now [EDIT] no it’s not. I was on the new page not front haha. Probably people sick of hearing about Twitter and flagging then.
  - sockaddr 4y ago
    I didn’t think about it until you mentioned it but really, why would the hacker type be interesting in all the happenings of $MEGACORP? Literally any small blurb about someone’s hobby would be more interesting. It would be nice to be able to personally filter by topic/keyword.
    - cheq 4y ago
      people just love controversy, even those who say they don't. Look at the many answers and engagement you can have comparing and talking about JS frameworks. Musk and apple is the same, makes a great ammount of engagement.
- FateOfNations 4y ago
  It's also just breaking, past 10pm on the west coast of the US, when we all should be in bed.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    That's morning in Europe and afternoon in Oceania, so there's still plenty of people on the site.
aldonius 4y ago
My guess is that (in addition to bot things) this is aimed at taking down e.g. Mastodon crosspost.
- dawnerd 4y ago
  The ability to mirror twitter accounts to mastodon will work just fine even without the api. I'm not sure there's too many people posting from mastodon to twitter.
kondro 4y ago
Better export those Mastodon accounts whilst you can! https://fedifinder.glitch.me https://fedifinder.glitch.me
- KVFinn 4y ago
  Twitter started blocking this stuff already, might be your last chance. >So you may have noticed that the Twitter login of https://movetodon.org/ https://movetodon.org/ is not working at the moment. >According to twitter, the app “has violated Twitter Rules and policies”. I can’t tell much more at the moment since the email they mention never arrived in my inbox. https://mastodon.social/@Tibor/109800904950500383 https://mastodon.social/@Tibor/109800904950500383
Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
Any word on whether this includes OAuth? I’ve been thinking I should deprioritise the “Login with Twitter” button anyway…
mambru 4y ago
Just when Snort is picking up...
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  ?
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    Might mean Nostr? https://nostr.com https://nostr.com
dan_pixelflow 4y ago
[flagged]
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  If its that important to your grade, could you not shell out for the paid service until your project is completed? I'm assuming this is a semester project of some kind, and probably not terribly high-traffic, so it shouldn't be too expensive. I know it sounds like giving into extortion because it more or less is, but at 40% it sounds like a serious chunk of your grade that it might be worthwhile if you factor in the cost of learning to not rely on someone else's charity. The last part isn't meant to chastise you. Twitter's API has long been free to access so it wasn't unreasonable to assume it would be so. But it has been true pretty much forever that you should not rely on someone else's goodwill and charity for a critical part of your project or business. (None of this is to say that this change isn't being badly managed, just that I think you still have options here, despite being somewhat unpleasant.)
  - dan_pixelflow 4y ago
    Agreed, I'll be waiting for more information - but it's even more mad that I have to wait until 'next week' for that, a mere handful of days before the shut off date as well.
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  And that's what they're relying on. Companies who rely on the twitter API to have no choice but to pay up to stay afloat
  - rvz 4y ago
    Well that is their fault for basing their entire business on someone else’s API. Twitter’s API terms are subject to change and now it has become a paid service. So it is time for those companies to pay up.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  On the bright side, you've learned something important.
jacooper 4y ago
Will this affect SSO with twitter? It should since SSO apps are API V1.1/v2 apps right?
- numpad0 4y ago
  They are clarifying that it should not affect SSO, but games relying on Twitter SSO are already moving towards deprecating it for fear.
- iamevn 4y ago
  There have been no carveouts announced for SSO. I am migrating as many of my accounts on other websites as I can off of Twitter SSO because it seems likely to me that they'll stop working and I'd lose access to those accounts if I am not proactive.
  - esskay 4y ago
    Thankfully a lot of those sites will still have your email address so you can bet a ton of places will be emailing people asking them to update their accounts this coming week.
DarthNebo 4y ago
RIP all twitter bots, apps & CRM tooling!
kbrkbr 4y ago
Just migrated my infosec early warning bot (search for #zeroday etc. plus a spam filter) to Mastodon. Goodbye and good riddance Twitter! Thinking also of all these data science courses that need to be updated now, I did two on edX and both had a Twitter project afair. Maybe they just do the same.
- mrzool 4y ago
  > my infosec early warning bot What's the handle? Sounds interesting :)
  - boudin 4y ago
    Would be interested as well!
    - kbrkbr 4y ago
      Since it was a company thing I was not allowed to publish the data, it was only pulled. Apologies if my wording created a false impression, that was not my intention
justsomeadvice0 4y ago
It's about cutting off any free exit ramps (people that use bots to xpost and tools that allow you to find/follow friends on new platforms), same as before. Then you make people choose: Twitter or "them".
Yabood 4y ago
We have a business that relies on the Twitter API. I don’t mind paying to access the API, but the way they’re handling this makes me want to deprecate support for Twitter entirely. I am only learning about this change from this thread. Even worse, we only have 7 days to react.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  This! The most striking thing about many of Musk's changes at Twitter isn't the idea behind the change but the appallingly bad execution. Things get rolled out practically over night with no explanation or warning. Same with the unannounced policy changes a few weeks ago. It's as if he'd not only never run a company, but never even worked at one. It feels like the intern is running the ship. Edit: typo "bag" => "bad"
  - callalex 4y ago
    And yet people want me to trust his software to drive a vehicle!
- jdthedisciple 4y ago
  Serious question though: If you're a business, is it really a huge deal to part with, idk, maybe $10-$20 a month for the API (idk what it will cost)? Talking in pure financial terms.
  - noahtallen 4y ago
    It’s actually much more expensive. See https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing/search-30day https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing/search-30day Up to 500 requests PER MONTH: $149.00 Up to 1000: $289.00 Up to 2,500: $699.00 Up to 5,000: $1,299.00 Up to 10,000: $2,499.00
    - dwild 4y ago
      Is this actually confirmed as it doesn't even make sense. That page mention a free tier of up to 250 requests, it only mentions search, and even though we can't see the content easily, Web Archive is saying that page has been there for the past 5 years... so is that really the future price? Or is it for a Search API that has been priced like that for a long time?
hmry 4y ago
That sucks. I have some personal Twitter automation scripts that only make 20 requests per week or so. No way I could justify paying for API access for something small like that.
- ncr100 4y ago
  Time to scrape instead of API call
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  I've got a few bots and a timeline archiver - if it's, say, $50 for a year of v1.1 API access, 1000 calls a day, I'd probably sign up for a year just to give people more time to follow the Fedi versions (migrated them in November.) If it works out to more than about $50 a year for my usage, I'm out.
barbazoo 4y ago
Something that was free is no longer free. More news at 11.
rsynnott 4y ago
Okay, so this one is nearly making me buy into those conspiracy theories that Musk is deliberately breaking Twitter because 4d chess (only nearly; this is incompetence rather than anything else). There's an argument to be had whether it makes sense for Twitter to have a free API tier. I personally think that it's obvious it should: - A lot of Twitter content/engagement is created by bots, and people quote-tweeting said bots. Fun bots are actually probably the biggest thing I miss after having moved to Mastodon (fortunately, the all-important Samuel Pepys bot has come across). - Use of paid-only APIs virtually always stagnates. If there's a free tier, hobbyists and students can do interesting things with them, and this drives innovation. Most of Twitter's important features (retweets, quote tweets, hashtags, etc etc) ultimately originated in third party clients, not from Twitter itself. - A free API makes it less frictionful for companies to try twitter out for things. If you want to maybe try showing your website status automatically or auto-track customer tweets at you in your support system or whatever, it's easier if you just hook up the app vs if you have to fill out a purchase order for the API access first. However, whatever about whether a free API is a good idea, it is clearly a _terrible_ idea to kill it on a week's notice. Even for users who _want_ to pay, with only a week's notice many will never hear about it, if their organisation is remotely bureaucratic it's probably not long enough to get the purchase order approved, etc. There's just no possible reasoning to do it this quickly.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > Most of Twitter's important features (retweets […]) ultimately originated in third party clients, Not sure about the others, but RTs did not originate with 3rd party clients, but simply organically with users. Back then we did RT @author OriginalText, third party client support for automating this came after it was established and displaying them differently much later.
- bantunes 4y ago
  He's a troll, so whatever the outcome he'll be able to say it was his intent all along (as trolls do).
  - libraryatnight 4y ago
KVFinn 4y ago
Twitter probably doesn't care about non US stuff, but RIP Japan Twitter. They use the free API for so much. J Twitter is frantically telling all the people to use non Twitter accounts before they lose access.
- klez 4y ago
  I'm intrigued. How does Japan Twitter works differently than western Twitter? Can you shed some light or provide a link to read about it?
  - Jach 4y ago
    I'm not sure it's all that different, just maybe you see more of it if you interact with JP twitter? Like artists use integrations to share their art on twitter and elsewhere, and lots of various services/games/survey-things prefer or require you to use twitter login instead of making you sign up with them directly and they use the API on their backend for various things. But that happens outside Japan too. I just wonder when and where they'll all go, and hope it's another global option instead of going back to a JP-only site... As a JP music fan it makes me happy that so many use youtube these days rather than niconico. (An idea Musk mentioned recently of promoting and auto-translating tweets from around the world is a nice one independent of everything else, my own twitter experience makes it feel much less like a hellsite just by virtue of following so many non-English speaking accounts that don't know or care about the latest dramas.)
    - KVFinn 4y ago
      >lots of various services/games/survey-things prefer or require you to use twitter login instead of making you sign up with them directly and they use the API on their backend for various things. That's all I mean. I don't use Twitter on ID on mobile apps and I don't think this is common at all in the US, but it's not uncommon for random gacha games to tie player ID by Twitter accounts in Japan. From what I can tell nobody is sure what the consequences of the change will be, like maybe auth only uses are fine. But since nobody knows, all the big games are playing it safe and telling everyone to move their player IDs away from Twitter.
rideontime 4y ago
$149/month for 500 requests, good lord. https://twitter.com/PaulTassi/status/1621162343039406084 https://twitter.com/PaulTassi/status/1621162343039406084
- bearmode 4y ago
  That's the existing premium tier, it's 500 requests per month, with 500 tweets returned per request. So 250k tweets ig
- detaro 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with the new paid-only API. This specific API (full history search for the past month) has been paid for years, at those price points. cf https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/introducing-twitter-premium-apis https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/i...
  - rideontime 4y ago
    What's the new "basic" tier going to look like then, if this is the existing scheme? How low can that quota go?
    - detaro 4y ago
      This is the existing scheme for one specific expensive API. Pricing for everything else clearly has nothing to do with it, and could be anything.
Hamuko 4y ago
How many news websites/blogs/things of that nature are still going to have Twitter accounts that link to their new posts? BBC Breaking probably will, but will Daring Fireball?
cguess 4y ago
A huge concern that no one seems to be mentioning is that pretty much all academic data sets that used the Twitter API were required by the TOS to only be released publicly with the tweet ids, not the content of the tweet. Some of these have hundreds of thousands of tweets, and the only way to check the work of the researchers, or to build on it, is to use the api to reseed everything yourself. With this new policy that practically becomes impossible (the costs would be outrageous for a researcher, much less an individual). This will have the effect of essentially destroying 15 years worth of social science work that was based on Twitter data, it's all gone. If you're a researcher who has published a data set with only IDs but have a private version with all tweet data I highly encourage you to publish that internal dataset. I'm putting together some hosting for anyone that needs it, feel free to get in touch and we can take it from there.
- jpeter 4y ago
  Grab them while they are hot. One week left
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    Grab and maybe push to `huggingface::datasets`?
    - metadat 4y ago
      Or a torrent.
- akmarinov 4y ago
  Maybe they should’ve considered whether it was wise to tie they research to a company that might not exist in 5 years
  - esskay 4y ago
    That clearly wasn't even an issue in the past. It's only since Musk took over that theres been anything said on the possibility of Twitter closing up shop, which as we all know frm Musks' well know history of spewing nonsense, will not happen.
vidalia 4y ago
Does this affect auth with twitter?
cdme 4y ago
I'm still surprised that anyone expected the acquisition of Twitter by a billionaire with a long demonstrated lack of empathy, social grace or self awareness would go at all well. He started a fire in a movie theater and now wants to lock the doors and raise the price on whatever water and extinguishers are on hand.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Whilst I like the fire analogy a lot. it doesn't capture how much he's on the hook vs what we loose if twitter dies. I will loose...... can't really tell. Elon will have irreparable reputational damage done to him forever.
  - ryanwaggoner 4y ago
    Will have?
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      In the sense, he'll find it somewhat harder to do things like get big loans in the future.
      - TwiceCubed 4y ago
        [dead]
  - cdme 4y ago
    Yeah I suppose the intent was to speak to the outcome of his behavior and subsequent efforts to claw back revenue — it may not be a fire intentionally set, but he set it all the same.
  - TheRealNGenius 4y ago
    [dead]
bvoq 4y ago
Honestly the amount of money hedge funds and high frequency traders make from twitter is insane. API could be profitable for huge amounts!
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Again, they already have an enterprise tier for business intelligence/market research, and have had for years. This is going to crush the providers of small bots, utilities, social science researchers etc, which are generally free or courtesy services. Right now it looks as if they're proposing to start the pricing at $149/month which allows up to 100 search requests a month, going rapidly into the thousands for any sort of volume.
  - romanovcode 4y ago
    Wait, what? 1.5 dollars per API query?
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Please disregard, that was an existing tier in their mid-term search API and I mixed up the free (100 requests/month) with the basic (500/month) due to fatigue. The latest (per a Musk tweet some hours ago) is '$100 month plus you have to submit your ID.'
  - hmry 4y ago
    No, that's the Premium Search API price (which is for business intelligence/market research like you mentioned) Prices for the new basic API have not been announced yet
fuddle 4y ago
One week to the introduction of a paid tier, and I haven't even received an email to notify me of the change. Surely your joking Mr Musk!
- Aeolun 4y ago
  At least you got a week of notice, instead of your account suspended and notice two days later.
pentagrama 4y ago
This will impact the "RSS to Twitter" function form https://ifttt.com https://ifttt.com right? I have a Twitter bot with a couple thousand followers using Ifttt free plan :/ Looking for an announcement from Ifttt...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- alexott 4y ago
  I have an Integration of Planet Clojure directly using API (direct posting allows attribution to specific person). So, 8.5k followers will be cut from that news source…
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  If it's a stock $100/month as Elno seems to float in a tweet, IFTTT should be ok, probably, assuming they want to pay. If it's something daft like $100/month for 1000 calls a day, we may well see integrations like IFTTT go down. Which will suck because I have A Lot of them right now.
fatfox 4y ago
Still no information about API pricing?

805 points by davidbarker 4y ago

I have a hard time believing that bots were using the free API and Twitter wasn't able to shut them down easily. Even a mediocre programmer could do that. Anyway, almost nothing Elon Musk has said about Twitter seems plausible and this also doesn't. I'm on the fence if he's trying to just generate as much cash flow as possible (after driving away so much ads money) or if he's actively trying to run Twitter into the ground.

college_physics 4y ago

At some point I saw speculation that the idea is to turn twitter into some sort of super-app like wechat. If that is true then it makes sense to button down loose "ecosystem" thingies that were setup during a more innocent and hopeful era. This will probably destroy a whole bunch of use-cases and motivations for people and organizations to use twitter, but might retain enough of a core (mostly low-information) user base to seed what will practically be an entirely new venture but one with a recognizable name. There might, for example, be new API's, for corporates to push product algorithmically and embed instant, buy now - pay later, buttons.

altacc 4y ago
I think that's nothing more than a pipe dream. It seems that Twitter is bordering dysfunctional internally and is hemorrhaging money at the worst possible time (massive debts to support, slowing economy, less accessible loans). I think Twitter's current strategy is desperately trying to make money and stop the losses. Many APIs do have price tiers but it depends upon the business model, if the API is the product, or the app is the product and the API drives traffic and use cases. For a super-app, arguably the app is the product & profit generator and an open, free API would support usage of that.
- arlcode 4y ago
  Also regulators in on some of Twitters core markets (EU and US) are not to fond of ginormous Techconglomerates at the moment and might have a few words to say about that. In fact the EU recently passed laws to nip budding "market dominant companies" before they take out all of the competition and bundle lots of unrelated services. The political climate soured with regards to Big Tech and that's happening across party lines.
  - college_physics 4y ago
    The perplexing thing is that all these headwinds are fairly well known and for some time (even though probably internalized more by participants in this particular forum). So this raises the question whether there was any rationality attached to the infamous $44bln purchase. One could hypothesise that it was just a random, discretionary action, made possible by an insane system that has lost any sense of value, purpose or accountability. In either case this story will definitely increase popcorn consumption.
    - arlcode 4y ago
      I'm in the "impulsive purchase including buyers remorse" camp. Also yes (wo)men in Elons Musks inner circle who are unable to contradict him. Now that the deals i done he needs to make the best of it (for his ego but also for Tesla control reasons). What will come of it remains to be seen. It could still end in a number of ways
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        I don't think it's that simple. Imagine if you had 'overpaid' for ownership of most US radio broadcasting in 1938. On paper it might look like a terrible investment, but depending on your goals and alliances it might be worth massively more than the book value.
        arlcode 4y ago
        Could be and billionaires have a tendency to fall very softly. I'm still figuring out how the "no due diligence, no exit hatch - final offer" figures into this. Why no not do it like you usually approach a takeover of this scale. He did try to wiggle out of it almost instantly and found himself locked into the contract by "himself". To me this feels like he made a fairly emotional decision, used his influential network and personal assets to setup the deal but was afraid to "chicken out"/face reality when given the chance.
achr2 4y ago
Who in their right mind would trust twitter with anything more 512 character banal musings after this tumultuous year? Mobile payments or secure messaging? Yikes!
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Teslas are cars. They may accidentally race through Chinese cities at 150 miles an hour sometimes, but people still buy and drive them.
dmitriid 4y ago
> At some point I saw speculation that the idea is to turn twitter into some sort of super-app like wechat. If that is true then it makes sense to button down loose "ecosystem" thingies that were setup during a more innocent and hopeful era. What do you think WeChat is if not integration of hundreds of external apps and developers? If you were really serious about turning Twitter into WeChat, you would: - have an actual plan how to do it - have this plan publicly available - explain the changes to the APIs beforehand - have the pricing info for the changes beforehand - give developers a clear path of moving to this new wechat thingie - give developers plenty of time to move to this new wechat thingie, work closely with them and figure out and iron out any issues What Elon did: - killed third-party ecosystem (Twitter wouldn't be twitter without third-party apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640515) with no warning and no path forward - killed a huge third-party ecosystem [1] with a week's warning and no path forward [1] Of course it's not just bots. Does he really think that news outlets, media outlets, celebrities etc. post to Twitter manually by hand?
- dmak 4y ago
  At this point, I think the person who paid bajillion dollars for twitter can do as they see fit. I'm just waiting for a new social media platform to pop up now.

akmarinov 4y ago

Guys, Twitter is we knew it is dead, it might even completely die soon. The sooner accounts like celebs, governments, etc realize it and move on - the better

throwawaylinux 4y ago
I don't use it aside from following links to it (e.g. from HN), so this isn't intended to be a counter anecdote... but from that perspective it seems almost exactly the same as before Musk took over. What's changed?
- acdha 4y ago
  Musk made the finances much worse by adding so much debt to the books right around the time he pushed a large number of advertisers and people who'd been creating content for him away. Twitter would otherwise have been looking at a profit measured in hundreds of millions this year, similar to what last year would have been without that lawsuit settlement.
aaa_aaa 4y ago
Do you refer to yourself as `we`?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  It's the PMC "we." Similar to the royal "we," except with more pleading.

moomoo11 4y ago

is it really that hard to just not use twitter? I swear to god replace meth with twitter and it’s sad how many addicts there are. Academic research? Research something else that’s actually novel. Making bots? Try building something new in the AI space. Need to reach your customers in case your service is down? Just use a different host for ur status.whatever.com and email/sms/whatever else them.

dividedbyzero 4y ago
I use it to keep on top of what my field of work is doing. Since pretty much all companies and many relevant people regularly post concise short updates with relatively little spam I can do that in about half an hour every few days. I could stop using Twitter and check everyone's website/blog/facebook(?) directly, but that would take a lot more time and I don't know where I would even find most of the individuals, I suspect they only use Twitter, and not all companies crosspost either. It would be a real shame to lose that.
- moomoo11 4y ago
  Yeah but wouldn’t your quality of the information you take in go up? Conversations on twitter are awful especially interesting ones in tech or science with the noise and chaos that always ensues. Personally I’ve been enjoying using my browsers bookmark manager. I’ve added maybe a hundred bookmarks last year of blogs and whatnot and it’s cool to organize my links and my home tab shows me them easily.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    I don't think so. I'd just miss out on more and filtering what's relevant and what isn't would be more time-consuming (I can scan 2-3 sentences in a Tweetdeck cell a lot quicker than a rambling blog post in heavily styled blog). If there's something I need/want to know in detail, I'll read up on it and maybe research further, so that wouldn't change, but I'd have a harder time finding these things and I'd probably spot emerging trends later (that's what Twitter conversations tend to be pretty useful for).

ecmascript 4y ago

Very short notice but otherwise I don't get why people are mad that it is going paid only. Try making an API request to Instagram or the other thousands of large websites that doesn't evne have an api. If you like the service, just pay for it. I pay for a lot of services already and I do not see why Twitter must absolutely be free. Honestly, I prefer a world where people charge for their products because it will make it easier for everyone when people stop expecting great stuff to be free. I also love how the people who mainly hate on Twitter now is roughly the same people that constantly said "If you don't like how it's being rung, build your own" etc. Now when Musk bought Twitter and thus got ownership fair and square, it does no longer apply?

Aeolun 4y ago
> Now when Musk bought Twitter and thus got ownership fair and square, it does no longer apply? That’s a false equivalency. We agree that he’s allowed to run twitter however he wants to (barring deliberately running into the ground, which is probably illegal). We just think he’s an idiot in how he goes about it.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Exactly. The way I see it, Twitter was a zombie company for quite a few years. Not sustainable the way it was. Lots of bots, obnoxious people, scammers, spammers, etc. and not a whole lot of positive stuff happening from a business point of view. Bloated big silicon valley company long out of ideas on how to fix things. Hiring more people and trying to be woke clearly wasn't helping. The notion that this could just have gone on as is was never a plan. Musk is applying shock therapy to maybe nudge it in the direction of resembling a healthy company again. Maybe he'll kill the company. Maybe it will work. But this is better than the failed social experiment it had turned into. The API of course had some valid uses but it was also the tool of choice for bots, advertisers, marketing bureaus, etc. The message is very clear for those: you are welcome to stay but expect to pay for the privilege. I think this probably gets rid of a lot of crap.
- ecmascript 4y ago
  Very few wants to pay for hosting crap, so yes I would also believe it would get rid of the overwhelming majority of the crap.

ing33k 4y ago

It makes me sad. But is it Musks way of cutting costs by ending free access to the API ? Perhaps this move is aimed at reducing infrastructure expenses for the company in addition to solving the bots issue and may be introduce additional revenue stream ?

brutuscat 4y ago

Time to crawl! You can use something like Webrecorder, which IPFS also uses to pin tweets: https://blog.ipfs.tech/announcing-pin-tweet-to-ipfs/ https://blog.ipfs.tech/announcing-pin-tweet-to-ipfs/ See https://webrecorder.net https://webrecorder.net Example https://replayweb.page/?source=https%3A%2F%2Freplayweb.page%2Fdocs%2Fassets%2Ftweet-example.wacz#view=pages&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fwebrecorder_io%2Fstatus%2F1565881026215219200%3Fref_src%3Dtwsrc%255Etfw%257Ctwcamp%255Etweetembed%257Ctwterm%255E1565881026215219200%257Ctwgr%255Ee8c57cea50b2bf6a340bb4387a88a33f6e5fb36e%257Ctwcon%255Es1_%26ref_url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Foembed.link%252Fhttps%253A%252F%252Ftwitter.com%252Fwebrecorder_io%252Fstatus%252F1565881026215219200&ts=20221002034606 https://replayweb.page/?source=https%3A%2F%2Freplayweb.page%...

naillo 4y ago
I've been using this https://github.com/JustAnotherArchivist/snscrape https://github.com/JustAnotherArchivist/snscrape and with 5 threads and no vpn, just my laptop, have been getting about 1 million tweets a day (vs 1000 before being rate limited on the api). Lots of fun
kibwen 4y ago
Headlines one week from now: "Twitter announces they will be discontinuing the web interface"
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  I'm holding out for 'Wanna tweet? That will be $1' Incidentally they started sending out emails yesterday offering gold organization checkmarks for $1000/month + $50 per public-facing seat. I'm not sure how many businesses will want this, but I bet a lot of political nonprofits and media outlets will leap at the opportunity to boost their visibility (more boosting available for more $, kinda like promoted tweets).
unboxingelf 4y ago
Aside: can someone explain to me how IPFS, in this specific case, is any better than a typical 3rd party service storing the data? The linked announcement says they use a pinning service “web3.storage”. Web3.storage says it stores data on FileCoin. Neither website tells me how and where the actual data is stored, except “IPFS”. From reading the IPFS docs, a pinning service is akin to a node that has a copy of the files and is always online. If your decentralized network relies on a central node(s), how is this decentralized?

tiagod 4y ago

I don't buy that reason. Malicious bot owners will just run automated browsers and use the regular UI, or MITM the private API used by the apps. Sure, they're probably using the public API right now, but that's just for convenience. Bad actors will ways find a way, this only hurts legit bot owners.

whoopdedo 4y ago
Or they'll simply pay the toll and carry on as usual. It's a business expense to them. And now, if they get blocked, they can complain about it because they're a paying customer.

Obscurity4340 4y ago

Don't threaten us with a good time /s

numpad0 4y ago

There is also a massive ban wave is going on, some people are claiming to have lost followers overnight in three to four digits and losing following account as well - mostly content creators with years worth of organic posts. Extra salt to the wounds is the horde of spam bots don't seem too affected, if at all, because they don't show up on Firehose too often, which is probably how this newly implemented spam filtering picks up contents to decide on. Some are speculating that some apps that had regular auto-tweets configured to be the culprit, which was later backed with some data, some are making up theories and rituals to protect accounts, some others are making backup accounts on Twitter itself, on Mastodon, or yet another platforms. This seems like another round of Twitter's footgun towards tumblr, with some users making it out, and bulk of values and the community burning to the ground.

JdeBP 4y ago
One thing to consider: These events where Twitter does something like this trigger visible migration waves, observable from the FediVerse and elsewhere. There are several spikes in graphs over the past few months, that correlate with things like disabling TweetBot et al.. People are giving out advice to those who migrate away from Twitter to unfollow everyone that they were following, but leave the account undeleted to prevent impersonation in the future of a long-standing identity. The unfollowing is in order to not accrue stuff with a zombie account and in order to let the people still sticking with Twitter know that their followers are gone. This fits with your observations: real followers gone, in a distinct wave, and robot accounts blithely continuing on. But it means that it isn't banning at all. The people seeing this from the Twitter side and thinking that it's down to some mysterious "ban wave" aren't realizing that people are simply leaving them; voting with their feet. Account figures won't show it, but dropping follower figures and massively curtailed engagement with real people do. The people who didn't like the politics have gone, or have been ejected. The people who were left exposed to unmoderated attacks have gone. The people who provided or who used the 3rd-party apps have gone. The people who relied upon a free-of-charge API to do all sorts of fun hobbyist and one-person-band things, from pictures of possums every hour to automated posts by artists and content creators, have stated that they're going, and have actually found themselves gone already in some cases within the past 30 hours, well before 2023-02-09.

niho 4y ago

I tried to create a Twitter account for my new startup a couple of days ago. Wanted a business account to promote my app and get feedback from users. But it was simply impossible. The signup didn’t work. I gave up and went with Instagram instead. Much better experience. And I’ve already spent a big pot of money there on ads. Very happy with it. Musk is such a looser.

nickjj 4y ago

Wow this is disruptive given it's less than 1 week's notice. I've been using a Jekyll plugin for like 4 years to embed tweets on my site. Nothing crazy, just using: https://github.com/rob-murray/jekyll-twitter-plugin https://github.com/rob-murray/jekyll-twitter-plugin Since it uses the API I guess that's going to go away. Sounds like I'll never link another tweet on my site again.

gonzo41 4y ago
screenshots?
- papito 4y ago
  That is horrible. I quite often click on embedded tweets and then end up spending more time on the site. It's literally a cheap lead in for ad exposure. Musk does not seem to understand how this whole Internet thing works. "If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how computers work.” https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover...
  - tee_0 4y ago
    You believe that there will never be embedded tweets again because twitter is going to charge an unknown amount of money for their API? You have musk derangement syndrome dude
    - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      He said he wants $100 a month, whatever that’s worth.
- kevincox 4y ago
  Why use an image where text will do (and will do better). But in this case it does seem like copy/pasting the text may be better as it implicitly archives the content.

DarkmSparks 4y ago

That's another project cancelled. Thankfully not much invested in it.

sylware 4y ago

Oh... is Nitter based on the API protocol is using the javascript obfuscated web browser protocol?

sylware 4y ago
Nitter is based on the obfuscated javascript network protocol then should still work after the API shutdown.
bob_theslob646 4y ago
>"Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)" Will be interesting to see if it works in a week

m463 4y ago

I'm reminded of the saying: "tax what you want less of" I wonder if this is a good move or one that will hurt the company in the long run.

Jach 4y ago

One of my first programming jobs involved helping the boss make a twitter sharecropping service. I remember at some point after that project twitter made a big TOS/API change and crippled a wave of startups at the time. I was doing something else by then but it was a good warning to not let myself ever depend too much on sharecropping; over the years I've seen a lot of people learn that lesson the hard way. I've used the API since then for on-off things, but the one I'm sore about now is a little Python script I've had running in a nightly cronjob for years that I've used to make local copies of images/videos from tweets I starred (now heart'd). It's a simple bit of code to get all my favorites and download any new ones. (If I recall correctly you need to get all of them, because the response doesn't necessarily give them to you in the order you liked them, so if today you like an old tweet from say 2012 you might have to paginate a while to get it in the response.) Looks like the json of all ~9800 liked tweets I build up to parse for new URLs is 1.5 MB gzipped, it's true their API returns a lot of unnecessary extra data. Currently debating with myself whether to cobble together a new script from one of the existing scrapers (gallery-dl might be easiest), or say screw it and write some Lisp code (more stable than Python) to fire up Selenium and waste more of twitter's bandwidth pretending to be a full browser.

RunSet 4y ago
https://i.imgur.com/CE6UCac.png https://i.imgur.com/CE6UCac.png
- dopidopHN 4y ago
  Lots of nice reference. I usually hates those but it was funny.
rbanffy 4y ago
> at some point after that project twitter made a big TOS/API change and crippled a wave of startups at the time. I remember. We shelved the product idea we had because of that. There were a couple API changes that disrupted development and it became clear that betting the company on someone else's API was a terrible idea.
xena 4y ago

Overtonwindow 4y ago

This wasn't handled very well, but… I do think it's the right thing to do. If you have a service that depends on something else (API) to make money, it's not unreasonable that you should have to pay a reasonable fee to that service.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Does this mean that all third party Twitter clients that don't scrape will require payment?

WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago

This makes sense... let's switch lightweight mostly-text API usage to full page scraping... this will cost Twitter a lot.

dom96 4y ago

If you're looking to transition to Mastodon I built a browser extension which might help. The extension injects your Mastodon timeline into Twitter, so you can for example follow some of the bots and accounts that will no longer be on Twitter (the ElonJet account being a particularly good example) and still see their posts on Twitter. It won't be affected by these API changes and should be a nice way to dip your feet into Mastodon if you haven't already. https://chirper.picheta.me/ https://chirper.picheta.me/

evan_ 4y ago

I’ve got a couple of dev accounts on Twitter and I still don’t think I’ve received an email about this. I wonder how many people will find out about this for the first time when their app breaks.

freewizard 4y ago
Same boat. And the price/limit is still unknown for this new basic plan. Fortunately only 1% of my users depends on Twitter API, so I just let them know I might just shutdown Twitter integration by 2/8 and suggest them all move off Twitter to other platforms.

lando2319 4y ago

Sad, I have a hacker news Vim bot, he doesn't even tweet that often. Ugh https://twitter.com/HN_Vimmy_Bot https://twitter.com/HN_Vimmy_Bot

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

I don't understand the problem. You can either use Twitter's official clients (and get served the ads from which they profit) or you can use a third party tool that uses the ad-less API but for which the developers must pay for each API call in your place. I'm sure that research bodies and other particular institutions could strike up a deal with Twitter to get access to special keys at a much reduced price or even for free, but this concept of Twitter making avaiable themselves a way to bypass the only way they make money has always seemed crazy to me. Glad they monetized the API.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

octacat 4y ago

More like cutting down the alternative clients. Kinda reminds me facebook limiting API access to "protect privacy" (and kill the way to scrap posts, so you can make an app with a different feed ordering). Though, still instagram is full of porn/spam bots with names annapeterson20243324 and the same profile description.

TwiceCubed 4y ago
[dead]

insane_dreamer 4y ago

this was clearly telegraphed some weeks ago when they cut off Twitter apps (Tweetbot at the like). Not a good way to go about it in order to engender good will, but I would never recommend building something that you expect to last forever around a free API by a for-profit company (which could be cut at any time). We've seen this movie before. As for Twitter's demise, I wouldn't count on it. I noticed a toot on Mastodon from someone I used to follow on Twitter mentioning they had 150K followers on Twitter and 1/10th of that on Mastodon. This person is a very harsh Elon (and Tesla) critic, so if anyone were to leave Twitter in protest it would be them. But that would mean losing a 150K audience, so not gonna happen (it's an influence, not money question). I myself did drop Twitter (though I didn't delete my account mostly in case I want to look someone up there) for Mastodon, but find that I go very little to Mastodon anyway (doesn't have anywhere near Twitter's breadth of content). So basically I've dropped Twitter-like engagement altogether, which is a ReallyGoodThingTM because it was a time sync that added very little value to my life. But I think I'm in a very small minority; most people want to stay connected. I'm still on IG (family/friends photos), and HN (interesting content), but that's it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jlee12 4y ago

I mean, fair enough man.

todd3834 4y ago

I imagine this will clear out a lot of bots

reidjs 4y ago

RIP Markdown Tweet Scheduler [1], you worked great while you lasted. [1] https://github.com/reidjs/markdown-tweet-scheduler https://github.com/reidjs/markdown-tweet-scheduler

bunnyswipe_com 4y ago

And the price is not affordable, 150 per month !!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tee_0 4y ago

I remember when steam came out people absolutely lost their shit. They rallied against it hardcore because they wanted complete control and ownership of their games. The single image that sticks in my mind is an animated gif someone made of the steam logo, two connecting rods, cycling back and forth like one of those mechanical fucking machines, fucking a guy in the ass. It was the same kind of juvenile vitriol that is currently on display. Imagine those people had been successful, and they might have been. Steam is beloved by everyone and is a huge and important part of gaming today. And why couldn’t those people just have an open mind about it? Why couldn’t they see past their own noses?

tee_0 4y ago
From a Reddit thread ten years ago: Steam killed big half-life mods. Essentially, by keeping all the clients up-to-date (by force) with no way to go back, they forced all the clients past where they'd released the SDKs for...

mkaszkowiak 4y ago

500 requests for $150 seems like inadequate pricing.

topherPedersen 4y ago

I think Elon is just trying to boost revenue. They have a product that isn't being fully monetized, so he's trying to squeeze a little more out of it. Pretty good business move to be honest. I haven't checked the pricing for the basic tier, but as long as it's reasonable and most indie devs can afford it, I'd say this is a good move. (I've used the free API before for side projects, and I would probably pay for access as long as the price isn't too crazy)

tdeck 4y ago
Aa a dev (indie or otherwise), wouldn't you be reluctant to invest more in a platform that did this? https://tapbots.com/tweetbot/ https://tapbots.com/tweetbot/
MrStonedOne 4y ago
[dead]

mjmsmith 4y ago

Enjoy https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/twitter-bot-api-changes-killing-fun https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/twitter... just for the phrase "Vichy Twitter".

browningstreet 4y ago

I reduced all my Twitter follows to basically road traffic and weather accounts. I'm wary about how much of this will continue to be available after these APIs go pay-only. I don't think it's a problem to charge a basic fee for these things, but the inscrutability, randomness, and untrustworthiness of Twitter policies and products may reduce the adoption rate for these changes - even if the fee was only $5/mo.

criddell 4y ago

I wonder how many people have decided that rather than move to Mastodon, Post, Cohost, or any of the other social networks, they don’t really need a Twitter-like service in their lives. How many people are fed up with Twitter and deciding to just drop it rather than move?

anigbrowl 4y ago
This internet fad is sure to blow over sooner or later.

sva_ 4y ago

Does Nitter use the API? > Uses Twitter's unofficial API (no rate limits or developer account required)[0] Not sure what that means 0. https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

banana_giraffe 4y ago
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/consts.nim https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/consts.nim They use a leaked token from one of the mobile clients that twitter can't/won't revoke.

heresjohnny 4y ago

I think I’m in the minority here, but I understand and support this decision. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like it: this move is bad for the internet and freedom of information. However, this company is close to bankruptcy and is sitting on a wealth of interesting data. Ads can provide revenue only up to a certain point, after which UX will be affected. If I were Twitter’s CEO, I would’ve done the same.

guywithahat 4y ago

As someone who's currently using the twitter API, this sucks, but I get it. The unfortunate bit though is I started using this in college when I had very little money. College students aren't going to cough up money each month to make a meme bot, and this might change the culture of twitter in a negative way

kderbyma 4y ago

Musk is an idiot. This is just another example of idiocy ... the best thing he provided was a meme face....and the sad face meme

jahnu 4y ago
Deliberately killing off free content sources for your platform that relies on fresh content to monetise is truly one of the most clueless things I’ve seen him do so far.

theonething 4y ago

If your business model relies on a valuable service you're receiving being predictably free, it's bad business model.

slaymaker1907 4y ago

I can't find any details about the basic API. It's ridiculous to do something like this without giving people concrete details about the paid plan. Also, their current premium plan is astronomically expensive. It's apparently about $150 for 500 requests!

cbeach 4y ago

If it’s a reasonable price I don’t mind paying a bit to keep my hobby projects going. To be honest I’m surprised I’ve had free access to Twitter’s graph for so long. That said, I’m pissed off at Musk for giving so little time, and so little information. I realise he needs to sort out the bot problem, and needs to diversify Twitter’s revenue streams, but developers have helped create legitimate content on the network, and helped invent a useful ecosystem around it, which in turn has helped Twitter grow its native user base and brand.

Justsignedup 4y ago

I think the main reasoning behind this is to get news orgs to pay to get their articles pushed to twitter. And its less costly than hiring someone to do it. The point is, as with everything musk, EVERYTHING IS POORLY THOUGHT THROUGH!

ggm 4y ago

Is there some law which says Musks other assets cannot be seized when the inevitable bankruptcy happens? Is see a lot of "it's 4d chess" comments and I keep thinking: wait, he has all these other assets: in the jurisdictions I live in he would be forced to meet his debts from Tesla and spacex shares.

yborg 4y ago
The debt is Twitter's, not Musk's personally.
- ggm 4y ago
  Fair. I didn't understand his cretinous allies had let him avoid any personal liability. I almost hope he does wreck it so that Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays and Mitsubishi investors takes a bath. Schadenfreude. https://www.afr.com/technology/looming-twitter-interest-payment-leaves-musk-with-unpalatable-options-20230118-p5cdg3#:~:text=The%20%24US13%20billion%20debt%20is,its%20Twitter%20Blue%20subscription%20service https://www.afr.com/technology/looming-twitter-interest-paym.... But, he's got $26b in it. He won't retain control unless he stands by the debts of the others, he'll be last in line for repayment if he wants to own it according to the AFR write up.

mattkevan 4y ago

Heh, 420 comments. Musk’s going to love that.

rfmoz 4y ago

They are doing that for give an small step backward next week, giving the impression that they are hearing the users. Hopefully it’ll give a narrow free api usage…

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

Frankly, I'm surprised Twitter gave out free API access at all. Bots have been the biggest problem for its platform for so long.

cramjabsyn 4y ago

What a joke

yablak 4y ago

Last chance to use https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ ?

senttoschool 4y ago

This is why I will never build a company based around a free API from a for-profit company. I'd never be able to sleep well at night knowing that years of work and all the employees/families that depend on the business is dependent on someone who could wake up one day and decide on a whim to end access.

npteljes 4y ago
I generally feel that if you like to sleep at night, business is not the way to go. I don't see how business people can just do one thing over a long time, and be sustainable. Rather, I see that successful business people (and I don't mean the outliers like Bill Gates) react to changes quickly and constantly adapt to new environments. The nature of their business always changes. So we enter Business Continuity Plans. The businesses either had that, or they were diverse enough so that one leg failing doesn't mean end of the business.
pjc50 4y ago
You should never build a company based around phone calls, because one day your phone might get cut off. You should never build a company around electricity, because one day your electricity might get cut off.
- xigoi 4y ago
  Phone and electricity are not a monopoly. You can get them from different providers.
warning26 4y ago
I think this every time there’s a “what cool thing should I build with OpenAI’s API?” post. A nice thought, but once OpenAI decides to pull the rug out from under you, it won’t matter what you built.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  > “It’s just an OpenAI/ChatGPT wrapper” is the new “It’s just an AWS wrapper” that would have made you miss a generation of cloud-native companies. https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1621204449959231493 https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1621204449959231493 People who build on top of them will have stacked cash in the meantime, even if the API does eventually get pulled.

anigbrowl 4y ago

- announced at 10pm - basically a week to decide what to do with your dev project - No information to help you make that decision This seems like more management by manchild. I strongly suspect that Musk realized his promises of cutting down bots etc. were failing and that they either couldn't or wouldn't develop abuse detection, so he's decided to solve the problem by making it cost money, with the (perhaps desired) side effect of crippling academic/analytic research. As an amateur network science researcher, I'm pretty steamed. I enjoy doing my own network analyses using tools like Gephi and have monitored probably a hundred breaking news or trending issues, as well as amassing a great collection of academic papers by smarter folk than me. I don't run any kind of app or service that sits on top of Twitter, but those who do run legitimate services are now being held hostage because of the unchecked abuse. Ant the failure to deal with botspam is lamentable. Twitter has refused for years to implement even the simplest things like hashing tweets and looking for collisions, or considering the count of edges to the hashtag graph, or even looking at tweet frequency. Many of their abuse problems will continue unabated; the sellers in the market for bogus twitter accounts are likely delighted because they now have a great excuse to raise prices, even though most of their 'product' is produced by hand with cheap labor in poor countries.

HWR_14 4y ago
Musks promises of cutting down on bots only mattered to him and to the degree he made a big deal about it. He could have declared victory whenever and been done with it. Who would have argued.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  I would have because all his posts are still full of bot spam and crypto scams... But, he certainly has no shortage of bots that upvote and call him king.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  I think people would have argued with him. There are people that fawn on him one day and then complain that 'the algorithm has shadowbanned them again' the next, and he spends a surprising amount of time engaging with them. It's like some weird parody of an abusive relationship, with the world's erstwhile richest man and uber-CEO earnestly and repeatedly appeasing influencers like 'Catturd.' To an extent I think this is political theater, as opposed to ineptitude, petulance, or poor financial decision-making. Twitter is an important piece of virtual territory because it's still the platform for breaking news and pretty much every media outlet publishes and promotes stories there, as well as most politicians, govt agencies and so on. Like it or not it is the most 'realtime' mass market platform. That gives Twitter tremendous strategic importance, even though its social graph is smaller and more ephemeral than Facebook's. Size is not everything; reach matters too. That strategic importance makes it interesting to state and non-state actors, because capture of that territory is loosely equivalent to control of radio broadcasting capacity or printing presses in earlier eras. If you think of Twitter as a magically effective print and distribution store for pamphleteers with a huge secondary ecosystem around it, the shutdown of free API access is essentially a market takeover. Musk was spitballing yesterday and suggesting that from now on API access would cost $100/month and require ID to use. (It's interesting to me that Google could have owned that space with their News product, although it has always been a one-way thing rather than socially driven. Their failure to own that space is a direct result of their aversion to user configurability and selection.)

NicoJuicy 4y ago

Twitter is going into code Red when news organizations are going to start charging Twitter for use of their site... Or simply blocking them.

olliej 4y ago
I don’t think that’s likely. News orgs dependent on people seeing ads, so they benefit from their story going viral on twitter more than I think twitter benefits from people posting them. At the other end you have the conservative news channels that aggressively push bigot nonsense, and short as hell wouldn’t drop the opportunity to continue twitters conversion to parler.
- herbst 4y ago
  What does going viral on Twitter even mean when no one is using Twitter anymore. That other bots, that don't use the bots API, find your used hashtags interesting?
  - aembleton 4y ago
    > no one is using Twitter anymore Many are still using it. If they weren't this story wouldn't have ranked so high on HN

Luciatrutth 4y ago

[dead]

anigbrowl 4y ago

@dang wondering why this rather major tech story doesn't make the front page, when stories with fewer points that were posted much earlier have. The lack of transparency is actively hindering HN's news functionality.

andreareina 4y ago
Probably a combination of: Users flagging the post Domain-based downweight (dang has mentioned it exists for Wikipedia for example, no idea if it’s automated or manual) Posts with bad comments:upvote ratio get downweighted (IIRC dang calls them overheated discursions?) And FWIW it’s on the front page now [EDIT] no it’s not. I was on the new page not front haha. Probably people sick of hearing about Twitter and flagging then.
- sockaddr 4y ago
  I didn’t think about it until you mentioned it but really, why would the hacker type be interesting in all the happenings of $MEGACORP? Literally any small blurb about someone’s hobby would be more interesting. It would be nice to be able to personally filter by topic/keyword.
  - cheq 4y ago
    people just love controversy, even those who say they don't. Look at the many answers and engagement you can have comparing and talking about JS frameworks. Musk and apple is the same, makes a great ammount of engagement.
FateOfNations 4y ago
It's also just breaking, past 10pm on the west coast of the US, when we all should be in bed.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  That's morning in Europe and afternoon in Oceania, so there's still plenty of people on the site.

aldonius 4y ago

My guess is that (in addition to bot things) this is aimed at taking down e.g. Mastodon crosspost.

dawnerd 4y ago
The ability to mirror twitter accounts to mastodon will work just fine even without the api. I'm not sure there's too many people posting from mastodon to twitter.

kondro 4y ago

Better export those Mastodon accounts whilst you can! https://fedifinder.glitch.me https://fedifinder.glitch.me

KVFinn 4y ago
Twitter started blocking this stuff already, might be your last chance. >So you may have noticed that the Twitter login of https://movetodon.org/ https://movetodon.org/ is not working at the moment. >According to twitter, the app “has violated Twitter Rules and policies”. I can’t tell much more at the moment since the email they mention never arrived in my inbox. https://mastodon.social/@Tibor/109800904950500383 https://mastodon.social/@Tibor/109800904950500383

Doctor_Fegg 4y ago

Any word on whether this includes OAuth? I’ve been thinking I should deprioritise the “Login with Twitter” button anyway…

mambru 4y ago

Just when Snort is picking up...

anigbrowl 4y ago
?
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  Might mean Nostr? https://nostr.com https://nostr.com

dan_pixelflow 4y ago

[flagged]

genocidicbunny 4y ago
If its that important to your grade, could you not shell out for the paid service until your project is completed? I'm assuming this is a semester project of some kind, and probably not terribly high-traffic, so it shouldn't be too expensive. I know it sounds like giving into extortion because it more or less is, but at 40% it sounds like a serious chunk of your grade that it might be worthwhile if you factor in the cost of learning to not rely on someone else's charity. The last part isn't meant to chastise you. Twitter's API has long been free to access so it wasn't unreasonable to assume it would be so. But it has been true pretty much forever that you should not rely on someone else's goodwill and charity for a critical part of your project or business. (None of this is to say that this change isn't being badly managed, just that I think you still have options here, despite being somewhat unpleasant.)
- dan_pixelflow 4y ago
  Agreed, I'll be waiting for more information - but it's even more mad that I have to wait until 'next week' for that, a mere handful of days before the shut off date as well.
ChrisRR 4y ago
And that's what they're relying on. Companies who rely on the twitter API to have no choice but to pay up to stay afloat
- rvz 4y ago
  Well that is their fault for basing their entire business on someone else’s API. Twitter’s API terms are subject to change and now it has become a paid service. So it is time for those companies to pay up.
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
On the bright side, you've learned something important.

jacooper 4y ago

Will this affect SSO with twitter? It should since SSO apps are API V1.1/v2 apps right?

numpad0 4y ago
They are clarifying that it should not affect SSO, but games relying on Twitter SSO are already moving towards deprecating it for fear.
iamevn 4y ago
There have been no carveouts announced for SSO. I am migrating as many of my accounts on other websites as I can off of Twitter SSO because it seems likely to me that they'll stop working and I'd lose access to those accounts if I am not proactive.
- esskay 4y ago
  Thankfully a lot of those sites will still have your email address so you can bet a ton of places will be emailing people asking them to update their accounts this coming week.

DarthNebo 4y ago

RIP all twitter bots, apps & CRM tooling!

kbrkbr 4y ago

Just migrated my infosec early warning bot (search for #zeroday etc. plus a spam filter) to Mastodon. Goodbye and good riddance Twitter! Thinking also of all these data science courses that need to be updated now, I did two on edX and both had a Twitter project afair. Maybe they just do the same.

mrzool 4y ago
> my infosec early warning bot What's the handle? Sounds interesting :)
- boudin 4y ago
  Would be interested as well!
  - kbrkbr 4y ago
    Since it was a company thing I was not allowed to publish the data, it was only pulled. Apologies if my wording created a false impression, that was not my intention

justsomeadvice0 4y ago

It's about cutting off any free exit ramps (people that use bots to xpost and tools that allow you to find/follow friends on new platforms), same as before. Then you make people choose: Twitter or "them".

Yabood 4y ago

We have a business that relies on the Twitter API. I don’t mind paying to access the API, but the way they’re handling this makes me want to deprecate support for Twitter entirely. I am only learning about this change from this thread. Even worse, we only have 7 days to react.

ajmurmann 4y ago
This! The most striking thing about many of Musk's changes at Twitter isn't the idea behind the change but the appallingly bad execution. Things get rolled out practically over night with no explanation or warning. Same with the unannounced policy changes a few weeks ago. It's as if he'd not only never run a company, but never even worked at one. It feels like the intern is running the ship. Edit: typo "bag" => "bad"
- callalex 4y ago
  And yet people want me to trust his software to drive a vehicle!
jdthedisciple 4y ago
Serious question though: If you're a business, is it really a huge deal to part with, idk, maybe $10-$20 a month for the API (idk what it will cost)? Talking in pure financial terms.
- noahtallen 4y ago
  It’s actually much more expensive. See https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing/search-30day https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing/search-30day Up to 500 requests PER MONTH: $149.00 Up to 1000: $289.00 Up to 2,500: $699.00 Up to 5,000: $1,299.00 Up to 10,000: $2,499.00
  - dwild 4y ago
    Is this actually confirmed as it doesn't even make sense. That page mention a free tier of up to 250 requests, it only mentions search, and even though we can't see the content easily, Web Archive is saying that page has been there for the past 5 years... so is that really the future price? Or is it for a Search API that has been priced like that for a long time?

hmry 4y ago

That sucks. I have some personal Twitter automation scripts that only make 20 requests per week or so. No way I could justify paying for API access for something small like that.

ncr100 4y ago
Time to scrape instead of API call
zimpenfish 4y ago
I've got a few bots and a timeline archiver - if it's, say, $50 for a year of v1.1 API access, 1000 calls a day, I'd probably sign up for a year just to give people more time to follow the Fedi versions (migrated them in November.) If it works out to more than about $50 a year for my usage, I'm out.

barbazoo 4y ago

Something that was free is no longer free. More news at 11.

rsynnott 4y ago

Okay, so this one is nearly making me buy into those conspiracy theories that Musk is deliberately breaking Twitter because 4d chess (only nearly; this is incompetence rather than anything else). There's an argument to be had whether it makes sense for Twitter to have a free API tier. I personally think that it's obvious it should: - A lot of Twitter content/engagement is created by bots, and people quote-tweeting said bots. Fun bots are actually probably the biggest thing I miss after having moved to Mastodon (fortunately, the all-important Samuel Pepys bot has come across). - Use of paid-only APIs virtually always stagnates. If there's a free tier, hobbyists and students can do interesting things with them, and this drives innovation. Most of Twitter's important features (retweets, quote tweets, hashtags, etc etc) ultimately originated in third party clients, not from Twitter itself. - A free API makes it less frictionful for companies to try twitter out for things. If you want to maybe try showing your website status automatically or auto-track customer tweets at you in your support system or whatever, it's easier if you just hook up the app vs if you have to fill out a purchase order for the API access first. However, whatever about whether a free API is a good idea, it is clearly a _terrible_ idea to kill it on a week's notice. Even for users who _want_ to pay, with only a week's notice many will never hear about it, if their organisation is remotely bureaucratic it's probably not long enough to get the purchase order approved, etc. There's just no possible reasoning to do it this quickly.

Semaphor 4y ago
> Most of Twitter's important features (retweets […]) ultimately originated in third party clients, Not sure about the others, but RTs did not originate with 3rd party clients, but simply organically with users. Back then we did RT @author OriginalText, third party client support for automating this came after it was established and displaying them differently much later.
bantunes 4y ago
He's a troll, so whatever the outcome he'll be able to say it was his intent all along (as trolls do).
- libraryatnight 4y ago

KVFinn 4y ago

Twitter probably doesn't care about non US stuff, but RIP Japan Twitter. They use the free API for so much. J Twitter is frantically telling all the people to use non Twitter accounts before they lose access.

klez 4y ago
I'm intrigued. How does Japan Twitter works differently than western Twitter? Can you shed some light or provide a link to read about it?
- Jach 4y ago
  I'm not sure it's all that different, just maybe you see more of it if you interact with JP twitter? Like artists use integrations to share their art on twitter and elsewhere, and lots of various services/games/survey-things prefer or require you to use twitter login instead of making you sign up with them directly and they use the API on their backend for various things. But that happens outside Japan too. I just wonder when and where they'll all go, and hope it's another global option instead of going back to a JP-only site... As a JP music fan it makes me happy that so many use youtube these days rather than niconico. (An idea Musk mentioned recently of promoting and auto-translating tweets from around the world is a nice one independent of everything else, my own twitter experience makes it feel much less like a hellsite just by virtue of following so many non-English speaking accounts that don't know or care about the latest dramas.)
  - KVFinn 4y ago
    >lots of various services/games/survey-things prefer or require you to use twitter login instead of making you sign up with them directly and they use the API on their backend for various things. That's all I mean. I don't use Twitter on ID on mobile apps and I don't think this is common at all in the US, but it's not uncommon for random gacha games to tie player ID by Twitter accounts in Japan. From what I can tell nobody is sure what the consequences of the change will be, like maybe auth only uses are fine. But since nobody knows, all the big games are playing it safe and telling everyone to move their player IDs away from Twitter.

rideontime 4y ago

$149/month for 500 requests, good lord. https://twitter.com/PaulTassi/status/1621162343039406084 https://twitter.com/PaulTassi/status/1621162343039406084

bearmode 4y ago
That's the existing premium tier, it's 500 requests per month, with 500 tweets returned per request. So 250k tweets ig
detaro 4y ago
This has nothing to do with the new paid-only API. This specific API (full history search for the past month) has been paid for years, at those price points. cf https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/introducing-twitter-premium-apis https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/i...
- rideontime 4y ago
  What's the new "basic" tier going to look like then, if this is the existing scheme? How low can that quota go?
  - detaro 4y ago
    This is the existing scheme for one specific expensive API. Pricing for everything else clearly has nothing to do with it, and could be anything.

Hamuko 4y ago

How many news websites/blogs/things of that nature are still going to have Twitter accounts that link to their new posts? BBC Breaking probably will, but will Daring Fireball?

cguess 4y ago

A huge concern that no one seems to be mentioning is that pretty much all academic data sets that used the Twitter API were required by the TOS to only be released publicly with the tweet ids, not the content of the tweet. Some of these have hundreds of thousands of tweets, and the only way to check the work of the researchers, or to build on it, is to use the api to reseed everything yourself. With this new policy that practically becomes impossible (the costs would be outrageous for a researcher, much less an individual). This will have the effect of essentially destroying 15 years worth of social science work that was based on Twitter data, it's all gone. If you're a researcher who has published a data set with only IDs but have a private version with all tweet data I highly encourage you to publish that internal dataset. I'm putting together some hosting for anyone that needs it, feel free to get in touch and we can take it from there.

jpeter 4y ago
Grab them while they are hot. One week left
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Grab and maybe push to `huggingface::datasets`?
  - metadat 4y ago
    Or a torrent.
akmarinov 4y ago
Maybe they should’ve considered whether it was wise to tie they research to a company that might not exist in 5 years
- esskay 4y ago
  That clearly wasn't even an issue in the past. It's only since Musk took over that theres been anything said on the possibility of Twitter closing up shop, which as we all know frm Musks' well know history of spewing nonsense, will not happen.

vidalia 4y ago

Does this affect auth with twitter?

cdme 4y ago

I'm still surprised that anyone expected the acquisition of Twitter by a billionaire with a long demonstrated lack of empathy, social grace or self awareness would go at all well. He started a fire in a movie theater and now wants to lock the doors and raise the price on whatever water and extinguishers are on hand.

gonzo41 4y ago
Whilst I like the fire analogy a lot. it doesn't capture how much he's on the hook vs what we loose if twitter dies. I will loose...... can't really tell. Elon will have irreparable reputational damage done to him forever.
- ryanwaggoner 4y ago
  Will have?
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    In the sense, he'll find it somewhat harder to do things like get big loans in the future.
    - TwiceCubed 4y ago
      [dead]
- cdme 4y ago
  Yeah I suppose the intent was to speak to the outcome of his behavior and subsequent efforts to claw back revenue — it may not be a fire intentionally set, but he set it all the same.
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago
  [dead]

bvoq 4y ago

Honestly the amount of money hedge funds and high frequency traders make from twitter is insane. API could be profitable for huge amounts!

anigbrowl 4y ago
Again, they already have an enterprise tier for business intelligence/market research, and have had for years. This is going to crush the providers of small bots, utilities, social science researchers etc, which are generally free or courtesy services. Right now it looks as if they're proposing to start the pricing at $149/month which allows up to 100 search requests a month, going rapidly into the thousands for any sort of volume.
- romanovcode 4y ago
  Wait, what? 1.5 dollars per API query?
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Please disregard, that was an existing tier in their mid-term search API and I mixed up the free (100 requests/month) with the basic (500/month) due to fatigue. The latest (per a Musk tweet some hours ago) is '$100 month plus you have to submit your ID.'
- hmry 4y ago
  No, that's the Premium Search API price (which is for business intelligence/market research like you mentioned) Prices for the new basic API have not been announced yet

fuddle 4y ago

One week to the introduction of a paid tier, and I haven't even received an email to notify me of the change. Surely your joking Mr Musk!

Aeolun 4y ago
At least you got a week of notice, instead of your account suspended and notice two days later.

pentagrama 4y ago

This will impact the "RSS to Twitter" function form https://ifttt.com https://ifttt.com right? I have a Twitter bot with a couple thousand followers using Ifttt free plan :/ Looking for an announcement from Ifttt...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alexott 4y ago
I have an Integration of Planet Clojure directly using API (direct posting allows attribution to specific person). So, 8.5k followers will be cut from that news source…
zimpenfish 4y ago
If it's a stock $100/month as Elno seems to float in a tweet, IFTTT should be ok, probably, assuming they want to pay. If it's something daft like $100/month for 1000 calls a day, we may well see integrations like IFTTT go down. Which will suck because I have A Lot of them right now.

fatfox 4y ago

Still no information about API pricing?